Who are your competitors? Online? Offline? Competitive Landscape analysis determines who they are and what they are doing in the organic search space. The best way to complete is to equip yourself with in depth knowledge of what your competitors are doing. The knowledge of where you stand versus your competitors creates the foundation of any search optimization strategy and gives you a baseline to judge your success.

The competitive landscape is an ever changing vista that must be constantly monitored. Some of your competitors are guaranteed to be optimizing their web site content. Every effort of theirs will affect your positions. That's not all. Search engines are crawling web sites 24/7 and constantly adding new content to their indexes. If Google adds 10 million new pages to their index, chances are that 10 to 10,000 new pages have just been added to your competitive business area and probably even your target keywords. If that's not enough, the search engines regularly overhaul their ranking algorithms to try to present the most relevant (in their minds) results to their searchers. Top rankings can not be maintained without consistent effort.

 here are a few key sections of the competitive landscape in a business plan.

The first is Competitive Analysis Summary. The point of this section is to give some one reading this without diving into the details the top points and reasons that your company is different and beats the competition. Hopefully, this section will be compelling and interesting enough that people will read into it more. Most likely, people will not read to deep into the competition but it is there for review when necessary and is an exercise you must complete.

The second is Competitive Analysis Matrix. This can be done in table format with the main competitive areas and companies on different axis. Many times people will spin the diagram so your company has all the boxes checked. Don’t do this. Be honest and recognize the 800lb gorilla. Don’t fear them, understand how to beat them.